


The lies we've led around (Winnipeg debug)

by gloss



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Post-Sburb/Sgrub
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-15
Updated: 2013-03-15
Packaged: 2017-12-05 10:04:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/721817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roxy tries to fix Jane.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The lies we've led around (Winnipeg debug)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [signalbeam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/signalbeam/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Other End of the Rope](https://archiveofourown.org/works/326288) by [signalbeam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/signalbeam/pseuds/signalbeam). 



> Title from the Weakerthans, "Leash".
> 
> Signalbeam, I don't know what I was thinking; you're just about my favorite HS author. I hope this manages to please.

Congratulations, you won/survived/escaped by the skin of your teeth/inconceivably outwitted SBURB! Revel in your glorious prizes and a life snatched, however briefly, from certain death!

Or just keep on keeping on. 

You live in this narrow, drafty bungalow down one of Winnipeg's back alleys. These alleys form a second city grid, overlaying but hardly identical to, the official one, which feels appropriate. For all you know, you're just visiting this world, getting in via the back door only to be evicted through the front.

It's a sad state of affairs when _you_ are the head of household and most reliable occupant. There is a sentient chess piece overcome by melancholy in the attic and a shellshocked girl curled up on the couch, eating premade cookie dough out of the tube. And you, bad hacker, worse friend, hovering in the doorway.

You drop down next to her and tug the itchy afghan over your legs. "Hey, guess what? I scaled the rock of Gibraltar, burst out of Zeus's forehead, wrote the formula for Dr. Pepper, New Coke, and Nazi Fanta in a single fevered dream. I am the omega, the omega is me."

This has been your strategy for years now: blow the logic circuits with impossible, fanciful, downright whimsical claims. Quantum the everloving _shit_ out of mind-control binarism. Tell enough tales to overload the system and blow it wide open. When the dust clears, help Jane out of the rubble, show her the light and truth, welcome her to life. You're Plato shouting into the cave, the woodsman slicing open the wolf's belly. You're finally the hero of something more than nothing.

This isn't that fairy tale. Instead, it's like Peter called the wolf right to his door. Doused himself in grubsauce and rolled right into its jaws.

"I am Charles Guiteau, the most stalwart of stalwarts," you tell her during a commercial for wine aerators. "You just gotta believe, Janey."

She turns those ruined eyes on you and blinks. A smile starts to move across her face, but it falters, then snuffs itself out.

"Lookie here, it's Monsieur Poirot!" You jab the remote in the air, jacking up the volume as the round, mustachio'd detective minces across a palm-lined lobby.

Jane takes the remote from your hand and switches the channel to something about home improvement. Weatherproofing, energy savings. She squeezes the end of the tube and laps up the lukewarm dough with the flat of her tongue.

On LOPAN, your lips were always swollen from kissing her. You could smell her on your hands, feel her move from the inside.

In Winnipeg, you fight to stay warm next to her.

*

It can be enough to drive any sane, right-thinking woman to drink.

Luckily, you're neither of those things. So when Jane crawls into your bed in the middle of the night, you make room for her, tug the sheet up over her shoulder, kiss the scar on her forehead.

"I'm Agent 355," you say. "I ran the Culper Ring. We could've kidnapped the Sailor Prince, if only they'd listened to me."

She frowns and snuggles in closer.

"Henri Paul took the wheel from me. I told Di to take that tunnel." You trace the delicate scar that descends, branching and doubling back, from below her eye down her cheek. Tap the tip of her nose and add, "I was born in the MK-Ultra laboratory, fully formed, four eyes and hallucinogenic amniotic fluid."

She frowns more deeply, even as you smooth the hair back from her temple.

"I will fuck your shit _up._ "

Her eyes flutter open. Even in the dark, you can make out the nacreous sclera and carnation-pink irises. You kiss her forehead again.

Jane closes her eyes. Maybe she'll sleep through the (rest of the) night. Maybe you will. 

Maybe pigs will fly and trolls will eat their vegetables.

*

You're in your office, which is, let's be honest here, your bed, turning the tiara-top over in your hands, when Karkat arrives.

"Here." He ejects a ~ATH manual from his sylladex. It bounces on the mattress and your cup of coffee overturns. "All yours, keep it, no need to return it, get it the fuck out of my life."

You're too busy mopping up the coffee to reply.

"You're _welcome_ ," he says after a bit. The sound of troll teeth rasping together makes your eye twitch and the back of your neck prickle: atavistic, uncontrollable responses to predation, danger, irreconcilable existences.

You didn't used to be this jumpy.

"Dude, I was about to --. Fine. Thanks," you say, and toss a handful of wet towels at his head. There are predators, and then there's Karkat, mussed-hair and bug-eyed and paranoid. "Your generosity exceeds the brightness of the stars themselves. Truly, you are a gift and a blessing."

You sketch a gracious little bow as he harrumphs and jams his fists into his pants pockets. 

"You people and your..." Beset by a sudden itch, he breaks off to scratch the base of one of his horns, face screwed up in something like agony. 

"Who people?" you ask, curious despite yourself. "What peeps? Humans?"

"Fuck!" In his exertions, he has broken a claw. He tries to speak around it as he sucks at his fingertip. "You. Sarcastic wisenheimers. Mouthy Lalondes, smug Striders."

You really wouldn't know much about that. You open the ~ATH manual and run your finger blindly down the title page.

"Anyway!" Karkat says, far more loudly. "You're welcome."

You give him the ghost of a smile. He rocks back on his heels, trying so hard to look casual that it's hard to see.

"He's up there," you tell Karkat and point out into the hall. "Crawl space."

You go back to the book. Out of the corner of your eye, you see Karkat perform an inhuman standing jump, the kind that remind you all over again how _insectoid_ the trolls are, into the opening to the crawl space. 

Cans clatter, the Mayor scolds, and your grip on the book has gone numb.

*

Breaking the logic loops has not succeeded so far. Hell, you've been trying to do it since you were about ten years old. 

You had thought that maybe you could reprogram Jane, do a full system reinstall, wipe her clean. But you're neither a hypnotist nor a witch, nor can you remember a time that Jane wasn't under some kind of fluffy, buttery, batterwitchy influence. Her digression into full-on red-hooded villain was a change of intensity, not category.

You still need to know what the Condesce did. The answer to fixing Jane might lie in understanding how she got broken.

You are not unfamiliar with some of the messier intricacies of ~ATH coding. You may or may not be the 1334 haxxor you claim to be, but you're not exactly a slouch. 

The superclass for every single declaration in the tiara-top, Jane's old phone, even her microwave, is the Condesce herself. Every action depended on her existence:
    
    
    ~ATH()(IC) {
    } EXECUTE (NULL);
    [THIS].R00L();
    

It takes you far too long to even get the code transcribed correctly. ")(IC" is not a series of simple keystrokes. Instead, it uses an image file, one more butt-ugly animated gif, each pixel another loop of logic that needs untangling. The rate of animation, the jump and wiggle of all that fucking glitter, seem to affect the running of the program.

You doubt there's any point to this effort. You're not going to heal, or even debug, Jane with guesses and re-compiled algorithms. 

Besides, the witch is dead. Fountains of purple blood jetted from her neck, from the pitchfork in her ribs, soaking Jake as he lifted her head free and overhand-lobbed it to Dirk.

*

On his next visit, you wait for Karkat out on the porch. You're not dressed for the autumn cold, but you like it this way. Penitential. Your toes curl inside your slippers, and you're hunched up, arms wrapped around yourself, barely moving except to bring the cigarette to your lips.

"What?" He stops short and turns on you.

"How's Jade?" 

He doesn't answer for the space of two inhales and long, smoky exhales. Finally, he says, "Better. Fucked if I know. What's the appropriate scale for a human barkbeast hybrid recently liberated from alien mind control? Good? Better? Orange? Forty-seven?"

"Yeah," you say and stub out the butt in the widening circle of ash on the railing. "There's leftover instar legs in the fridge. Help yourself."

He opens his fist to show you the crumpled snack. Moocher, thy name is Vantas. 

His grasp on ~ATH is flimsier than even yours. You get a sob story about dead lusii and cursed timelines and very little concrete info.

"Back to the madhouse," he says when he's finished sniffling and crunching the instars. "Got a dancestor who won't shut up about existential privileges of the living versus the oppressed deceased and a Jade who needs her kibble."

*

You hate ghosts more than anything, ever, except maybe the empress herself and the taste of raw pumpkin. It's just one more bullshit monkey's paw Skaian gift: ghosts in the game get to come with you, but the ghosts of those you lost? Shit out of luck, deader than dead, dead and gone and no goodbye.

So you have the Condesce's dancestor snooping through your cupboards and eating your food, but no happy little canary-yellow Jake to go see Scorcher VII, Tugg Speedman's triumphant return to the genre, with. Let alone a Strider to cheat at Words With Friends.

You're seventeen years old and the opposite of an orphan: a parent with dead kids.

"Here's water we're going to do," Meenah announces, handing you the tiara-top. It has certainly seen better days; the lacquer is chipped from your impassioned attempts to break it open. (You'd finally succeeded, only to find it was empty.) "Put that on, I'll sea if I can read your puny-tuna mind."

She is having way too much fun with this. Even when you shake your head and put the tiara back on the table, she just laughs.

"You got a better idea?"

You don't. "Give me a minute."

"No," she says and laughs louder, snatching the tiara, playing keepaway. She's brought the smell of brine and gull-shit with her, smell of your childhood, everywhere lapping water and starving faces.

You elbow her away -- she's resoundingly substantial for a ghost -- and gingerly set the tiara on your head.

She's squinting at you, tongue licking the sharp points of her teeth. "Looks like chum on you. You got _any_ style, human?"

Static, low but insistent, crowds at the back of your mind. Not just the buzz, but the flickering black-white-gray of no reception, is crawling up your neck, swirling in your ears.

When the Batterwitch fell and Jake ripped the tiara from Jane's head, she vomited static and blood. It ran from her tear ducts, out her nose, from her ears.

It's in you now, much weakened, twining around your neurons. Something's plucking at you, making you jump, dance, bark like a cat.

"A cat?" You have enough presence of mind to stop there, leaning against the wall for support.

Meenah reclines in the armchair, knees wide apart, gaze flicking over you. She _is_ Condy, otherwise this experiment wouldn't work, but she also is _not_. Like Jane is the girl you loved but not. You are alive but you might as well be dead. Everything is true, some of it is a lie, and all of it is false.

You were never a philosopher. Questions of existence, of knowledge, yes and no and maybe, these were Dirk's domain.

If Dirk were here, he'd have fixed Jane in no time. That might have necessitated making a Janebot or three, sure, but he'd still have gotten the job done.

You, you're just wasting time.

"Like a cat," Meenah says more firmly.

The static churns up your spine, up your gullet, drowning you. Before you can do anything, you're down on all fours. Meowing.

"Hey hey heiress!" The static drops away as Meenah gets to her feet and opens her arms. "Got a hug for your old pal?"

Jane looks down at you, impassive. She is as blank as she was while the Condesce pulled her strings, but there's nothing behind her. No fire, no animating force, however evil. She's just a pretty shell, looking at you as you struggle to your feet.

"Go," she tells Meenah. Then she touches your shoulder and pokes at the tiara. "No."

You shake your head, trying to dislodge the tiara; it claws at your hair and scorches your skin, but eventually it comes off. 

*

"Not yours," she says every so often. At dinner, she passes you the box of Pop-Tarts, but you pass it to the Mayor without taking any.

You tip your head onto her shoulder and breathe in the warmth at her hairline. Jane pauses chewing and, eventually, pats your knee.

"I'm the last woman on Earth," you tell her. All you have left is the truth. "I love you."

Pink and white sprinkles sticking to his cheeks, the Mayor salutes. His has always been an office dedicated to justice and transparency.


End file.
